A few things. 1) It's been accepted for sometime that governments are supposed to act as the "brakes" on unbridled capitalism. 2) The genie's out of the bottle now. Nobody's going to forget those seven decades where everyone did really well. We might not make it again, but I doubt Capital will ever have it as easy as they did before WWI. 3) Severe social disruption could precipitate revolutions or wars, which, while incredibly destructive, will certainly address the question of economic inequality.

1) They experienced 19% inflation. YOU DON'T WANT INFLATION DO YOU? (Actually moderate inflation around 4%-5% is one of the best ways to hurt wealthy folks who make their money through existing wealth and not labour. In fact if wages keep pace you can almost mitigate the effects on the poor entirely.).2) They stuck the UK with the bag for deposit insurance on most of the accounts. YOU WANT A RUN ON BANKS OR EMPTY ACCOUNTS? (But they did actually work out a settlement repay the UK in the end).

link wrote:The United States has the second lowest share of self-employed workers (7.2 percent) – only Luxembourg has a lower share (6.1 percent). France (9.0 percent), Sweden (10.6 percent), Germany (12.0 percent) the United Kingdom (13.8 percent), Italy (26.4 percent) and 14 other rich countries all have higher proportions of self-employment.

link wrote:We have a long tradition in the United States of seeing small business as the driving force behind our national prosperity. An important part of our national identity is built around the idea that –thanks to low taxes, limited regulation, unfettered labor markets, and a national spirit of entrepreneurship – the United States offers an environment for small business that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. The international economic data, however, tell a different story about the state of U.S. small business. By every measure of small business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors (as a proportion of total national employment). The lower taxes, less stringent regulations, and freer labor markets in the United States, it appears, have not yielded greater small-business employment here than elsewhere.

This from a conversation of how a lack of proper socialized medicine is actually holding the US back.

Krugman was on Colbert last week explaining that the latest "Obamacare will cost 2.5 million jobs!" talking point is actually a reference to the fact that a shitload of people are going to cut back on their hours because they will no longer have to overwork themselves to get healthcare.

I take the kneejerk reaction I have to articles like this to make jokes about She Who Thirsts as evidence that I will never truly be cool.

BUT

I do think there is some psychological value to "work", broadly defined, as some external reinforcement of your value as a human being. At the very least, having to come up with some way to define yourself that doesn't involve what you do (because you don't do anything) consistently leads people to pretty dark places.

I didn't read it as that. I took it as more of a matter-of-fact statement that if you have a true welfare state, that at least some people will opt for a parasitical life. It's only offensive if you want to believe that every last person is noble and self-sacrificing.

The statement was also in conjunction with his musing that some people will opt to do something that's maybe just self-sufficient, which they can only really afford to do if they're receiving a government subsidy. For instance a person running a class on a really obscure topic, unsupported by a university or other school. Or a guy who decides to become a really awesome admin for an online game server. These seem like things that might happen given a lot of leisure time.

I think that's all a big question we ought to be looking at. A lot of folks have responded to globalization and automation by saying it's not much different from past economic upheavals and that eventually it will all shake out and new jobs will be created. But I'm not so sure. There have been plenty of technological changes that have irrevocably altered human life on this planet. Why would it be a stretch to imagine us crossing an automation threshold where there is not enough work to do. If we can go from a ratio of 95% farmers to less than 5%, why could we not go from a ratio of 70% workers to something under 50%? I believe it is technologically possible.

That doesn't mean work will disappear entirely, but that we're going to have to confront the issue of "surplus" people. Hell, even if you had a giant war or disease kill off vast swaths of humanity, that wouldn't actually solve the problem, because it's now an issue of proportion rather than absolute numbers.

So what do we do socially to address the lack of work? Do we change our social mores to make not working more acceptable? In a world with fewer jobs, each requiring above-average levels of skill and concentration, do we look down on the merely-average person who simply opts out? Do we cut workweeks shorter, as people in the early 20th century thought would happen (again due to automation)? Do we actually find enough work for everyone with some magic new industry requiring lots of average warm bodies? Do we create make-work programs? Do we do nothing and let a shrinking pool of educated, moneyed folk wall themselves off from a growing crowd of idle malcontents (guess how that one turns out)? Will we be down and out in the Magic Kingdom?

pacobird wrote:At the very least, having to come up with some way to define yourself that doesn't involve what you do (because you don't do anything) consistently leads people to pretty dark places.

That's a fair point, but people defining themselves (or being defined by others) by what they do also has its dark places in its extremes. Historically, tons of awful people have gotten away with vile stuff because their community decided that their usefulness outweighed their turpitude. Like, say, a village tolerating how the local doctor beat his wife, or to take a striking recent-ish example, the likes of Paterno and Sandusky. Right now we have a society that so frowns on good men doing nothing that it often suffers bad men doing evil.